[Writing songs. What's the United Nations up to?]

[Economic sanctions. What are the songs about?]

[Sex.]

[That's so much more interesting than economic sanctions.]

[It is! You should come have a listen when you're done with your meeting.]

[After the UN I'm talking to some representatives from miscellaneous medical unions about how very unkind of me it was to put them out of jobs and what I'm going to do about that. You could sing it at me over the brainphone, but then I guess I'd miss the instrumentation.]

[And it might distract you from your meetings.]

[And we can't have that.]

[I don't know, can we?]

[Do you want to be responsible for me blushing in front of the Mayo Clinic representative?]

[Maybe.]

[That would be embarrassing.]

[Does that mean I shouldn't sing you my lovely new song just yet?]

[Yeah, let's wait until I figure out doctor retirement packages. In the meantime whatever shall we do about this boring meeting? Wanna listen to more Stories Of The Adventures Of Bells or something?]

[Always.]

[I could tell you about how Amariah's afterlife got handled, I haven't gotten to that one yet. Unless Ghosty or Aianon told you; they were there and I wasn't.]

[They haven't mentioned it, no.]

[Okay. Amariah's world is the one with the external animal souls, I know I mentioned that but did it stick?]

[Yeah. Green kingfisher. I remember.]

[So if you have one of those, you have to stay close together, or it hurts, unless you do it anyway for long enough and far enough, and then the bond is all stretched out and you can be as far apart as you like. Witches like Amariah do that as a coming-of-age thing, but humans also never do unless they're spies or in horrible accidents or have inconvenient fish daemons or something. Even though it would be really useful to be able to leave your bear or your whatever at home sometimes. It's just that unpleasant. The Alethia worldsheaf doesn't have daemons out-and-about in all of the subworlds, but the parts of people that are daemons have this property even when they're all folded up 'asleep' inside their people - you don't want to be without it. And the thing about the Alethia afterlife is that it didn't let daemon-parts in.]

[...Ouch,] says Ripper.

[So everyone who ever died in Alethia was in a state of what amounts to perpetual physical and emotional torture, not so fun,] continues Bella. [Time also went faster there, so if someone died fifty years ago they would have centuries of being dead under their belt. And on top of that, the afterlife was populated by harpies, who have this magic screaming thing they can do to make everything bad you've ever done bubble up and make you feel like crap. They feed on - emotions and stories from life and stuff in general, but the only one they can elicit on purpose is guilt, so they did a lot of that.]

[That sounds horrible. I bet Amariah wasn't happy.]

[She was not! She found all this stuff out partially by asking this artifact she has called an alethiometer. It dispenses objective truth - only it's hard to use. Her boyfriend Kas can do it intuitively, though, so that's not such a problem. The alehtiometer couldn't tell her everything, though. Some stuff is hidden from it. By this character called the Authority, who made the afterlife, and the harpies, in the first place. The Authority is also known as 'God'.]

[Eugh,] says Ripper.

[Yeah. This didn't really bother Amariah on a theological level, of course, since witches have this pantheon of goddesses they call on for spells and don't go in for human religion, but it gives you an idea of the kind of power this fellow was throwing around when things were made. So, she figured first she'd investigate the afterlife, fill in the gaps in what the alethiometer could tell her. She could leave her daemon Pathalan - he's a cute little owl - behind, because she's a witch and got that taken care of when she was younger. And her boyfriend did the same thing, later in life, to save her and Path from some asshole, but that's another story. Anyone else who tried to walk into the afterlife without dying first would leave a daemon behind who couldn't get in, which, as aforementioned, is pretty unpleasant.]

[Doesn't sound like she'd be getting a lot of volunteers.]

[Most of us turned her down. I didn't particularly want a firefly-soul, personally. But she got a few. Aianon, Ansharil, and Ghosty all showed up without daemons appearing for them. They weren't the right species. Ghosty wound up having to leave some of her presence outside the afterlife, but otherwise could move around normally. Aianon and Ansharil were different - as long as they didn't try to go into the afterlife, nothing happened, but the alethiometer said that if one of them went the other would acquire daemon properties. Bear that in mind if you ever consider touching Ansharil - daemon-touching is a huge thing, even if Joker daemons are a little more gregarious than normal.]

[Got it,] says Ripper.

[To deal with the discomfort of separation, they used a couple tricks. First, daemon-touching is a huge thing for both positive and negative reasons. Sarion went with a wish on to prevent her from getting a daemon and snuggled up to Ansharil while Aianon went to make it less unpleasant. Shell Bell went too, and she brought her girlfriend - a Sherlock nicknamed Pearl - along, to hold her smew. Smews are a kind of duck, they're pretty. Cam used a different trick - his magic notebook, the alethiometer suggested, could turn into a daemon, but before she did that, there was nothing stopping him from being as far away from her as he liked, so he put her down and went the requisite distance and then made a contingent wish stating that if she would be his daemon instead of a new one appearing out of nowhere, that could happen. And then his notebook flew out of the woods where he'd left her and landed on his shoulder. She can switch between notebook and bird shapes now.]

[Flying notebook bird. All right.]

[She's a Cooper's hawk, when she's a bird,] Bella adds. [So you've got Cam and Amariah and Shell Bell and Ghosty and Kas and Aianon, prowling the afterlife, and on the dock by the river that runs around the place you've got Pearl holding the smew, Sue coordinating everybody, and Petaal and Pathalan and Grace just sort of hanging out. Sarion and Ansharil weren't on the dock, they were just by Amariah's house.]

[All right. And what happened?]

[Well, they didn't really understand how harpies worked. The alethiometer told them there was some danger about and it was hurting the dead people but it couldn't be more specific. Kas found one, but it took one look at him and flew away - Jokers don't really do guilt. And then,] Bella says, [Shell Bell found one.]

[...And Shell Bell does guilt?]

[She shouldn't really, but she does. The thing she feels guiltiest about is that when she died she wished Pearl was there with her to help her. So when the harpy screamed at Shell Bell, Shell Bell's smew started bawling and apologizing to Pearl and feeling bad about being comforted by being held and trying to get away.]

[Owww,] says Ripper.

[Yeah. And the topography of the land of the dead is all screwed up, wishes don't work there, and you can't teleport to destinations inside of it - you can leave, but nobody could teleport to Shell Bell, she wasn't listening to anything people said over Sue-link, they couldn't wish the smew asleep and hope he'd drag Shell Bell with him, the alethiometer could give them directions for how to get to her but it wasn't very quick about it. Pearl got fed up with waiting. She's a Sherlock, and they can find stuff - she flew over the river, left a gyrfalcon daemon behind her, and located Shell Bell. The harpy screamed at Pearl too, but Sherlocks are pretty good at working through negative emotions; she scooped Shell Bell right up and teleported her out to the dock to recover.]

[Good for Pearl,] he says, impressed.

[Yeah, she is intensely devoted to Shell Bell. So newly-split Pearl reassured newly-split Shell Bell. Everyone else who was exploring the land of the dead got alethiometer directions so they could converge on each other and not get caught alone, and they found a group of more harpies.]

[Did that end in tears and horror?]

[No, they talked to them, and Bells aren't all that diplomatic, even Cam, but the Jokers did a slightly better job of not antagonizing them and telling them non-guilt-related stories to keep them happy, and Amariah eventually got them to agree to work for her in the revamped afterlife, to make sure no one too awful returned to the world of the living. Jane does that, Downside, and I'm muddling along without her here; in Alethia it's reformed harpies. But I'm getting ahead of myself; the harpies said that they'd been made by the Authority, and the alethiometer couldn't tell them all that much about him, and Amariah was concerned that if she did anything to the land of the dead he'd made, he'd just undo all her work. So obviously he had to be handled next.]

[So of course she dragged everybody off to have a friendly word with God,] snorts Ripper.

[Well, Shell Bell and Pearl went home.]

[Right, that makes sense. And how did the word with God go?]

[They couldn't teleport directly to him. They had to go to the base of this floating mountain and fly up the rest of the way, and they got interrupted by some angels. Not the same kind as Angela.]

[What kind, then?]

[A semi-insubstantial magical kind, whereas Angela's ancestors just genetically engineered some of them to have wings and warm blood and pretty singing voices and good muscle tone. So a flock of these little angels who could barely hurt a fly all tackled Aianon. He could have gotten them off, but he'd have wound up killing six of them if he so much as beat a wing, and Amariah wasn't quite ready to authorize lethal force, so he just sort of let them carry him off.]

[...This is an incredibly hilarious mental image,] giggles Ripper.

[Isn't it just? So everyone else kept flying up, because I guess they weren't as high a priority as the literal demon, and they meet this bigger, more substantial angel, and he said they had to leave.]

[I wonder what they did next,] Ripper says innocently.

[Oh, turned around, gave up, went home,] says Bella merrily. [It's kind of an anticlimactic story, I don't know why I bothered telling it.]

He cracks up.

[Nah, they wouldn't leave, and the angel let Amariah describe what she wanted but turned her down, and they still wouldn't leave, and the angel charged up some kind of light bolt attack and swatted her and Cam and Kas. Kas torched on the spot - Jokers don't load up on wards the way Bells do - and was kinda stunned. Cam hit the ground. Amariah recovered faster, she's been flying since she was little because witches do, and she got her dagger out and fought the angel.]

[Oooooh, did she win? I'm in suspense!]

[She stabbed him in the gut, offered him a chance to surrender, he told her to die and started charging the beam again, she cut his throat, he dissolved.]

[Damn,] laughs Ripper. [Remind me not to piss her off.]

[Oh, it's safe to piss Bells off under normal circumstances, it's just not safe to get in our way when we are trying to end the torment of several billion suffering creatures.]

[Got it.]

[Not that I advise pissing Bells off, it's just that summary execution isn't the standard response. Anyway. They went on up through some magic fog they couldn't see through even with the see-through-specific-stuff power I invented, and felt around for a way into the mountain, and found it. And in this mountain was a crystal box with no openings that contained a wrinkly faded old angel.]

[...uh-huh,] says Ripper. [Wonder who that was.]

[He wouldn't say. She tapped on the glass to get him to wake up and talk to her, but he almost fell apart. He couldn't remember who he was. The alethiometer knew, though. It was the Authority.]

[Thought so.]

[He didn't want to do anything. He just wanted to be left alone. He wasn't going to get in her way. So she left him alone. The other angels, on the other hand, continued to be a problem. They wanted - on the Authority's behalf, but they didn't know how far he'd dwindled - complete control of everything. Everyone in unthinking obedience. Cam tried to talk to them, but they didn't want to talk. The mountain still forbade wishing, but not enchantment. Amariah made an angel tank that slurped them all up and kept them there and gave them food and water, and made it so new angels would get their own compartments in case they weren't friends with the main flock, because the alethiometer said not all angels followed the Authority. And she stuck the mountain where it was, since it was conveniently in a subworld that didn't have any life in it.]

[That is convenient.]

[And then everything was set up for her to design her own land of the dead. She made a subworld, from scratch, that worked how she wanted it.]

[...That's a thing you can do?]

[With a big, big coin. She tried an arrow and it didn't work. She got Brilliance to make some tenners for her.]

[Neither can I. Unboosted humans can't even make evils, and pretty much need magic to survive making stars. But Brilliance can.]

[Wow.]

[Yeah. He made a significant batch, they got handed out to the peal, Amariah needed two - one to make the subworld work how she wanted it, and one to make sure it caught forthcoming dead people instead of the old afterlife.]

[That is incredible.]

[There's a reason she's the one I described when I was contending that I am not the most interesting Bell.]

[I kind of have a complex about being the undistinguished one. I'll probably show you off a bit at the next party, be all 'Iiiii have a unique boyfriend'.]

[You can show me off as much as you want,] he promises. [Make all the other Bells jealous.]

[Except Amariah and Cam, who I think it has been established are likely to work out any incipient jealousy by borrowing you.]

[But they don't get to keep me.]

[It's true! I am pretty lucky on that count.]

He giggles.

[So anyway, now the afterlife in Alethia is all nice, and people there have their daemon-bits back, and can sleep, and get a nice little memory jolt so if they spent a million years being dead forgetting who they were they get it back on moving locales, and if they are nice and enough live people want them back they can go be alive again.]

[I thought Bells disdained sleep.]

[For ourselves, yeah, except recreational naps, but not everyone has something better to do with their time. And they couldn't sleep, in the previous afterlife. They just had to be conscious all the time.]

[Which was tremendous fun, I'm sure. So what was that 'other story' you mentioned earlier, about Amariah's boyfriend...?]

[Ah, Amariah sent Path on an errand. Witches do that sometimes, since their daemons can go wherever they want. And on his way, some random psychopath got hold of Path. Daemon-touching is a bad thing. If you're not a Joker, you don't want anybody but your very favorite person in the world getting their hands on your daemon - the way Amariah talks about it I think it must be worse than rape - Jokers have slightly longer lists of favorite people and a lot of tolerance for shit happening to them but otherwise same deal. And she woke up as soon as the guy got Path, and Kas figured out what was going on and asked the alethiometer how to save him. And the alethiometer said the way to do it was for Petaal to turn witch-shaped and fly, alone, as fast as she could to the right place and kill the guy. If Kas went with her it would have slowed them down too much or he would have been too obvious on the final approach since he can't shapeshift and Joker daemons can. It took hours, it was a long flight, but the kidnapper was being really slow about getting around to killing Path, so she was there in time, and she killed him, and she brought Path home.]

[Yeah. Since then, Kas is a one-person list of non-daemon people allowed to touch Path.]

[No kidding.]

[Her aura tells everybody else to back the hell off. Kas and Petaal's aura does something a little like it - you can tell if it's okay for you to touch them - but anybell can, pretty much, although I haven't tried it.]

[...Anybell can touch Petaal? How much longer is this 'slightly longer' list of favourite people?]

[Much. It came in handy, though, Sarion was broken when she met Kas and Petaal in Milliways, and their aura told her it was okay to snuggle right up, and they got her in touch with the peal and we fixed her.]

[...I feel like I should remember what happened to Sarion - oh, was she the one with the telepathic thing?]

[Yeah, she's the one who had to bond with Ansharil to save the world and this involved involuntary mind-reading and after a while she'd pretty much stopped having thoughts because having them hurt.]

[Right,] he says. [That one.]

[Yeah. Yaaaay, UN meeting over, I get to go listen to doctory grievances now.]

[Have fun with that.]

[I'm sure it will be fascinating. All, 'but people NEED to suffer from kidney stones, it builds character and lines my pockets!']

[How many people have actually made that argument so far?]

[In those words, not at all, but I have been asked very solemnly if I considered the economic implications of curing cancer.]

[...Right. Remind me never to go to one of those meetings. I'd fucking punch someone.]

[And you wouldn't believe how people get about immortality, especially religious groups.]

[Oh, do tell.]

[I'm depriving life of its natural meaning, I'm going to slow down science and politics because conservative theorists and ideologues won't shuffle off the mortal coil in a timely manner, I'm depriving people of reasons to have faith in something greater than themselves, I'm the literal Antichrist, torching is snake oil and I'm encouraging people to behave unsafely, resurrection obstructs a healthy mourning process and how dare I interfere.]

[Ooh, are you the Antichrist?]

[No. I can't wait to hear what kind of results Juliet gets when she starts working with humans as well as demons, though, she has an aura of menace and also fire.]

[...She can turn it off, can't she?]

[She can, she probably will, but it'd be funny if she left it on to talk to the local Pope, wouldn't it?]

[Hilarious.]

[She was all nervous about it when she first got it, but she got to like it.]

[Is there another story there?]

[Yyyyyes but it's not for general audiences. The abridged version is that she comes from a world where vampires lose their souls and this has behavioral consequences, and she got murdered, and turned, and there were behavioral consequences, and the one of her that's running around now is just the one from Downside so she doesn't have continuity with the vampire her but she still feels bad.]

[All right.]

[Hmm, Bell stories, Bell stories... any requests?]

[Nothing springs to mind; I don't think you've left any major loose ends dangling that I remember...]

[There's a funny one about how Glass got engaged.]

[All right, let's hear it.]

[So Glass introduced herself and the queen said she could marry one of them and if she could get that one pregnant she could marry the other one too. So she married Steel and knocked her up and married Iron too and they have each emitted one kid now, one a little older than the other two.]

['Emitted',] he giggles.

[Yep. Three girls. There are eight kinds of Bell kids and so far they're all girls for some reason - I mean, Glass has a causal reason, the magic just worked that way for when it's two moms.]

[Eight kinds?]

[Yeah. Glass's three are unique so far - the other ones with Sherlocks and Tonies don't have kids. Angela has four, Rose's two match the older two of Angela's, and Golden has one with Edward.]

[I'm tempted to start drawing family trees, here.]

[There's a bit of confusing terminology for relationships to the families of alts, or alts of families. The going thing is to talk as though alts are siblings, find the closest one, branch from there, and then add -oid - so, Rose's eldest Yseult and Angela's eldest Damaris are alts, Yseult and Angela's youngest Peninnah are sisteroids, the rosebuds and cherubs relate to the Joker's kids or Glass's little beads as cousinoids, etcetera. It breaks down a little, but it's close enough for many purposes.]

[Has anyone drawn family trees? And - rosebuds, cherubs, beads, seriously?]

[Why, what would you call them to refer collectively? And I don't think anyone's drawn trees, no - perfect memories make them less useful.]

[At least they're self-explanatory. And Golden's kid doesn't get a cutesy collective noun because there's only one of her?]

[Yeah, she's just Elspeth. If she had any siblings we'd probably call them nuggets or something.]

[Well, now that you've suggested it, absolutely. I think Shell Bell is considering having kids and they'll be saddled with something molluscy, I don't know about Amariah's but maybe something to do with those pine branches witches fly on, I don't think Juliet's planning on it any time soon and it probably won't have been fifty years for her when we repeal because she has Jarvises but maybe they'd get something fire-themed, no clue for the others.]

['Something molluscy' like what? Pearls?]

[No, that's Shell Bell's Sherlock's nickname. Something like cowries or scallops.]

He laughs again.

[I don't know what they'd do with me. 'Pattern' doesn't really lend itself. 'Ringlets' or something I guess.]

['Ringlets' is all right.]

[Yeah. I'm not in any hurry to produce ringlets, though.]

[Good to know.]

[Yeah. Okay, I think I have convinced these doctors that their problems are important to me and I will do my best to address them and I can refer them to staff for more detailed negotiations about their retirement packages now.]

[Oh good.]

She could kiss him! That's a thing they could do.

It certainly is.

[Not lately,] he says cheerfully. [But you can always mention it again.]

[I liiiiiike your music.]

[I am definitely getting that impression,] he says, and kisses her some more.

Kisses kisses kisses. Squirm.

Kisses! Lots of kisses.

Flavor of the day is - let's say praline.

Ooh. That's new! New and tasty. Om nom.

She does strive to be yummy. It has such pleasing results, after all.

And Ripper strives to make those results very pleasing! Because she is yummy. And he likes her. And she squirms so delightfully. And he likes her. And she keeps trying on all these interesting new flavours. And he likes her.

She does. That is a characteristic of hers, is delightful squirming.

Ripper is very happy about all of those.

Cuddles are nice.

Soooo nice.

Nice and cuddly!